Ron Kohavi, PhD

I am a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and General Manager of the
Analysis
and Experimentation
team at Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group.
I was previously a Partner Architect at Bing, part of the Online
Services Division, General Manager for Microsoft's Experimentation Platform, director of data mining and personalization at
Amazon.com, and VP of Business Intelligence at Blue Martini Software.

Leading a team of about 80 data scientists, developers, and PMs at
Microsoft's Analysis and Experimentation.

Grew data mining and personalization team at Amazon from 50 to 90,
founded and grew the Experimentation Platform team at Microsoft from
scratch to 50 top notch members (full time and contractors),
including six principal-level team members.

While I have been working in industry
since 1995, I continue to publish sporadically.
My h-index, a measure of
productivity and impact of published work, is 50 according to
Google Scholar, with over 34,000 citations to my work. Hirsch,
who proposed the metric, suggested that an h-index of 10-12
is considered a useful guideline for tenure decisions at major
research universities; a value of about 18 could mean a full
professorship; 15-20 could mean a fellowship in the American
Physical Society.

The paper
Online
Experimentation at Microsoft, 2009, was recognized as top 30
Microsoft ThinkWeek paper and an early version of it won 3rd place at the
Third workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Practice Prize, 2009.

Scientific Advisor to Trusted Opinion, 2007-2008.

Member of Technical Advisory Board, mySimon, 1999-2000 (until they were bought
by CNET).

General Chair,KDD 2004.

Short Bio

Ronny Kohavi is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the General
Manager for Microsoft's Analysis and Experimentation team at
Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group. He was previously
Partner Architect at Bing, part of the Online Services Division at Microsoft.
He joined Microsoft in 2005 and founded the
Experimentation Platform team in
2006. He was previously the director of data mining and
personalization at Amazon.com, and
the Vice President of Business Intelligence
at Blue Martini Software, which went public in 2000, and later acquired by Red Prairie.
Prior to joining Blue Martini, Kohavi managed
MineSet project, Silicon Graphics' award-winning product for data
mining and visualization. He joined Silicon Graphics after
getting a Ph.D. in Machine Learning
from Stanford University, where
he led the
MLC++ project, the Machine
Learning
library in C++ used in MineSet and at Blue Martini Software.
Kohavi
received his BA from the Technion,
Israel. He was the General Chair for KDD 2004, co-chair of KDD 99's
industrial track with Jim Gray, and co-chair of the KDD Cup 2000 with Carla
Brodley. He was an invited speaker at the National
Academy of Engineering in 2000, a keynote speaker at PAKDD 2001, an
invited speaker at KDD 2001's industrial track, a keynote speaker at EC 10 (2010), a keynote
speaker at
Recsys
2012, a keynote speaker at
Emetrics 2014,
and a keynote speaker at KDD 2015.
He was an invited speaker at all three
MIT Code conferences
(Conference On Digital Experimentation) in 2014, 2015, and 2016.
His papers have over
34,000
citations and three of his papers are in the top
1,000 most-cited papers in Computer Science.
In 2016, he was named the 5th most
influential scholar in AI and the
26th most
influential scholar in Machine Learning.